Robert Stein (1950)

Robert Stein (1972)

Robert Stein (2000s)

About Me

editor, publisher, media critic and journalism teacher,
is a former Chairman of the American Society of Magazine Editors, and author of “Media Power: Who Is Shaping Your Picture of the World?” Before the war in Iraq, he wrote in The New York Times: “I see a generation gap in the debate over going to war in Iraq. Those of us who fought in World War II know there was no instant or easy glory in being part of 'The Greatest Generation,' just as we knew in the 1990s that stock-market booms don’t last forever.
We don’t have all the answers, but we want to spare our children and grandchildren from being slaughtered by politicians with a video-game mentality."
This is not meant to extol geezer wisdom but suggest that, even in our age of 24/7 hot flashes, something can be said for perspective.
The Web is a wide space for spreading news, but it can also be a deep well of collective memory to help us understand today’s world. In olden days, tribes kept village elders around to remind them with which foot to begin the ritual dance. Start the music.

Monday, October 21, 2013

Could Health Care Elect Hillary Clinton?

Whatever
happens between now and then, Obamacare will still be an issue in 2016 and, if
the former First Lady is a candidate, it will bring health care reform full circle
after two decades.

That
could be a wholesome development for the body politic, taking the debate back
to the climate of 1993 before Tea Party rancor reduced it to an ugly surrogate
for hatred of America’s first African-American president.

Back
then, the Clintons embarked on a serious effort to fix a broken system and, if
they made tactical mistakes, the opposition and their eventual defeat occurred
in a comparatively rational Washington.

A
sadder but much wiser Hillary Clinton, with unquestioned political achievement
of her own, would be the ideal President to restore sanity to the issue. At the
very least, this time she would not be facing the resentment of an unelected
First Lady taking the lead.

As
Obamacare rollout unfolds, it will face more than the technical glitches
impeding progress. Experience will undoubtedly show possible substantive improvements, but could they be made in the face of Cruz-driven do-or-die rhetoric?Two years from now, as the 2016 campaign
unfolds, there will be enough experience with the Affordable Care Act to identify
issues and start making efforts to strengthen it.

Who
better to lead the charge than the Hillary Clinton who said in 1993:

“Millions
of Americans are just a pink slip away from losing their health insurance, and
one serious illness away from losing all their savings. Millions more are
locked into the jobs they have now just because they or someone in their family
has once been sick and they have what is called the preexisting condition.

“And
on any given day, over 37 million Americans—-most of them working people and
their little children—-have no health insurance at all. And in spite of all
this, our medical bills are growing at over twice the rate of inflation, and
the United States spends over a third more of its income on health care than
any other nation on Earth.”

If
she were running for the White House two years from now, the former First Lady,
Senator and Secretary of State would be overwhelmingly qualified to revisit
that argument and reassure Americans that Barack Obama’s achievement was not a
government takeover but the beginning of a long-term improvement in the state
of their health care.